


Hag Sukkot Sameah!

by emimix3



Series: Jacob Zimmermann [2]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Camping at home, Cold Weather, Huddling For Warmth, Jewish Holidays, Jewish Jack Zimmermann, M/M, Sleeping Together, Sukkot | Tabernacles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-23
Updated: 2019-10-23
Packaged: 2020-12-31 18:04:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21149939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emimix3/pseuds/emimix3
Summary: Bitty didn't expect to go to Providence to visit his boyfriend, just to find him building an awful-looking tent on his balcony. Who does that, really.





	Hag Sukkot Sameah!

**Author's Note:**

> Me; hey Simhat Tora just ended isn't that the exact good time for a Hag haSukkot fic

When Bitty arrived in Providence after his home game on Sunday morning… Well. He didn’t expect to find Jack on his balcony, trying to set up – a tent?

“Hiiii?” Bitty said, hesitant, as he walked to the balcony to join his boyfriend.

“Uh. Bits. You’re already here.” Jack replied, surprised – and a wall of the tent? hut? fell on his face. "_Tabernacle. _And I can say that."

Bitty ran to help him out, even more confused than before.

“What is this horror?”

“Oh, come on, it’s not _that_ ugly,” Jack groaned, as he tried to fix the wall – that was in _dark_ _blue_ **_tarp_**. It was _that_ ugly, really. “I began to build it after Kippur, but – didn’t have time to finish. And now I can’t make it stand and I need it ready before the service. I try to follow a video - (And indeed, his phone was propped on the balcony’s table, playing a video of a guy who had way less difficulties to build his own tent) but it won’t work.”

“Service? Is that a religious thing?” Bitty asked, dropping his bag on the floor so he would help Jack out more effectively.

“Yep. Hag haSukkot. It’s a sukka.”

“… Y’all get to build sheds.”

With Bitty’s help, setting up the sukka was far easier. All walls were fixed, it didn’t seem to be about to fall, and Jack explained Bitty about the pine branches he was using for the roof, roof that they set up while eating a pizza they got delivered.

It was still quite ugly, though.

“We need decorations. I bought fairy lights and I also have some flowers I took when I got the roof branches, and maybe we could get the plants I have inside the apartment to put in there?”

In the end, it was okay-looking. You could still see the blue tarp, there was no way around it, but at least now there were other things you could focus on, and old comfy carpets that Jack probably bought in a second-hand or antique store on the floor. They moved the tables and chairs of the balcony inside the tent, as well as the bean bag that Tater one day brought, and that has been in the living-room ever since.

“At home, in Montreal-” Jack said, with a soft smile, while he was fixing some flowers here and there, “-we have movable wood walls. It’s less… Plastic-y. But it’s the only thing I found that was easy to store and that would survive the rain we’ll have this week.”

“How long do you need to leave this thing?” Bitty asked.

“All week- gotta spend all my free time here, and have my meals, and sleep.”

Bitty blinked. Once, twice.

“… Sleep?”

“Yeah, we’ll push the table out and get the fold-up couch in the guest room, it’s easier to manoeuvre than a bed,” Jack stated, matter-of-factly.

“Jack. It’s the middle of _October_, in _Rhode Island_.”

“It’s not that cold? I mean. Except if it rains it should be okay. We’ll get blankets.”

“Jack, you’re going to die.”

“Am not. You can stay inside if you want, but I’m sleeping here.”

“Love, with all due respect. You’re Canadian, alright, but you’re _nuts_.”

“Naaaah. I’ll survive.”

They left the sukka to be (the holiday begins only at nightfall, Jack explained), enjoying their afternoon together until Jack had to leave for the service at the synagogue. Bitty walked him to the entryway, where Jack dressed to go out – and really, if you need to specifically dress to go out, _you shouldn’t sleep there_ – and Bitty saw him secure a crocheted kippa on his head, before hiding it under his Falcs cap. Bitty motioned his boyfriend to lower his head a bit, and he took off the cap, so he could look take a look at the kippa.

“It fits you well,” Bitty said, looking at the blue and beige crochet work.

“My dad says it makes me look like and old hippie.”

“Yeah. Fits you well,” Bitty chuckled, taping his head before putting the cap back.

Jack stood up back straight, smiling.

“You got the address of my Rabbi?”

“Yes, yes, you texted it to me…”

“Don’t be late for dinner-”

“I won’t. See you later. Love you.”

“Love you,” Jack said, kissing his boyfriend goodbye before leaving. “Also work on your thesis while I’m gone.”

They went back home straight after dinner at the rabbi’s, who had invited Jack and Bitty and several other students and people from the community who didn’t have a family to go to for the first festive meal of the holiday. Bitty was exhausted – he had had a game this morning, so he woke up at an ungodly hour, and he even _did_ some work on his thesis this afternoon, and he just learnt that tomorrow, for lunch, they were invited to eat in Jack’s neighbour’s own sukka before Bitty had to take the train back to Samwell, and that was way too many meals outside for this Georgian boy in _October_ in _New England_. Also Jack had asked him if he was free Wednesday night for a dinner at the Haus 2.0 in the sukka that Holster had set up – apparently, Jack would spend the week feasting _everywhere_.

Once home, Bitty helped Jack to push away the chairs and the table enough so that they could set up the guest room’s folding couch in the sukka, and they put on some sheets and Jack’s weighted blanket and at least three others, as well as the heater that a teammate lent to Jack.

“Did you set up something like that in the Haus?” Bitty asked him.

“My sophomore and my junior year, yes. It was on the reading room, we camped a few nights there with Holster and some other Jewish teammates, but that was all we did and it wasn’t really a kasher one. My senior year – there were huge rains during the whole festival, you remember? We didn’t even try to set one up, I used the communal one there is on campus the one night it wasn’t raining too much, just like I did when I was a freshman and living in a dorm room. I wasn’t really observant in college anyway.”

“How is that?” Bitty asked, sitting on the bed. “If you don’t mind me asking. I – I noticed that you’re more religious than in college, for sure, with the whole keeping kosher thing, but even then, you’re more than last year – I know you pray more often in the mornings, and you talk more often about going to services, and you think I haven’t noticed but I know you still have your kippa under your cap right now.”

Jack sat right next to him on the bed, with a pinched smile.

“… You think it’s weird?”

“No, sweetpea, I don’t think it’s _weird_. I just have questions, that’s all.”

“It’s… Well. It was hard to be religious in college. I was only really friends with Holster, who is barely observant, and I barely had time to go to the campus’ synagogue, and… And I tried to keep as much kasher as I could and I called it a day. But… I grew up religious. And I missed it, I guess. It’s… It’s a part of me, a part of my culture, a part I put away for years because I needed to conform to expectations, and… Providence was a clean slate, I guess, a whole new community, a whole new place, a whole new routine, so I could include more Jewishness in it. And it’s still a process, step by step, and there’s a lot I won’t be able to do for a while, but. I like it. I’m proud of the small steps I manage to do. Even if it’s just covering my head with a cap because I don’t have the guts to be seen in public with a kippa.”

He took off his cap as he was saying that, putting it on his lap. Bitty put his hand on his.

“Do you think you’ll have the guts one day?”

“Maybe. I wish.”

“I wish too. It fits you well. Makes you look proud.”

Jack smiled, and quickly got his arms around Bitty’s waist to draw him to his chest and fell down so they were both lying on the fold-up couch.

“Mmh. Love you.”

“Love you too sweetpea, but I’m not sleeping outside.”

“We need to honour our ancestors who got lost in the desert, Bits.”

“_Your_ ancestors, not mine.”

“Statistically speaking, they’re the ancestors of almost all of humanity. Genealogical trees are one big tumbleweed and everyone is from the same family.”

“Stop talking about humans being incestuous monkeys.”

Bitty set himself more comfortably against Jack’s side, Jack who had the presence of mind to pull a blanket over them.

There was something romantic, in lying there together in the sukka, watching from under the roof’s branches the few stars they could see when in the city

“Okay, it’s not that bad,” Bitty admitted, as he watched the fairy lights dance around the roof. “If you don’t see the tarp.”

“You should see- how it is, in my parents’ cabin, in the middle of nowhere. You can see the stars because there’s no light pollution, and there isn’t the noise of all the cars but you can hear all the birds in the morning. The years we could spend Sukkot there were my favourites.”

They laid some more time there, talking about everything, and nothing. About the annual barbecue party Alicia and Bob held every year and that both their families crossed _continents_ to attend, about Christmas at the Bittles’, about how they both had older relatives they weren’t exactly sure _how_ they were related to, about the dozens of cousins they both had even if they were only sons.

And finally, they stopped taking, and Jack began to kiss Bitty, and kiss him more, and more-

“What are you doing?”

“A Monopoly, obviously,” Jack replied, in between two kisses on Bitty’s neck.

“Honey, we can’t have sex here! Not in the _sacred tent_!”

“Sex is sacred.”

“It is not.”

“It is! It’s a mitzva! It strengthens couples!”

“I refuse to believe your religion tells you to fuck, Jack.”

“Didn’t you hear Laetitia at dinner? She asked Rabbi if it was kasher have sex in our sukka, and he said ‘Yes, of course’. I mean, I guess it’s technically only kasher if you’re married, but it’s 2019 so Rabbi is probably under no delusion that the young adults of his conservative congregation have premarital sex. Hell, he definitely had premarital sex himself.”

“I don’t want to think about your Rabbi’s sex life, Jack.”

“I mean… I can stop,” Jack said, ending the kissing immediately.

Bitty glared at him, not really sure of where he wanted all of this to go.

“Jack, what about your neighbors? What if they hear?”

“Who in their right mind would be on their balcony in Rhode Island in the middle of an October night?”

Bitty spent the night in the sukka, in the end. There were all the blankets of the apartment, and a heater, and Jack’s arms, so it wasn’t that cold, really.

That was a tradition he could get behind.

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr](http://insertatitlehere.tumblr.com/)   
[Other OMGCP works](https://archiveofourown.org/works?utf8=%E2%9C%93&work_search%5Bsort_column%5D=revised_at&include_work_search%5Bfandom_ids%5D%5B%5D=1147379&work_search%5Bother_tag_names%5D=&work_search%5Bexcluded_tag_names%5D=&work_search%5Bcrossover%5D=&work_search%5Bcomplete%5D=&work_search%5Bwords_from%5D=&work_search%5Bwords_to%5D=&work_search%5Bdate_from%5D=&work_search%5Bdate_to%5D=&work_search%5Bquery%5D=&work_search%5Blanguage_id%5D=&commit=Sort+and+Filter&user_id=emimix3)


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